KIRKUS REVIEW

From the reminiscences of four worldly women emerges a vivid
portrait of the life and times of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Secrets play little part in this latest from esteemed espionage
author Littell. Rather than spin a tale of clandestine agents, Littell fashions
an extended dialogue among four blatantly forthright witnesses to history. As a
premise, Littell opens with one R. Litzky, once “a young American…Moscow State
University [student]…minoring in Fatal Flaws of Capitalism” and now an
86-year-old man living in Brooklyn Heights. Litzky stumbles upon a cache of
tapes he recorded more than 60 years ago in which four women recall their
relationships with idolized poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. (Mayakovsky and the women
are all based on actual people.) Litzky says the women tell “the butt-naked
truth,” and he means it. As Mayakovsky “couldn’t decide which was more
important to consummate: erections, poetry, or revolution,” the transcribed
tapes are akin to an R-rated version of All About Eve with the
four ex-lovers sniping over the primacy of their passionate affairs and
relationships with the poet. In a comment intended not “as a compliment, only a
description,” Nora Polonskaya, a “foul-mouthed blonde theater actress,” calls
Lilya Yuryevna, Mayakovsky’s muse, “an epicurean at the table of carnal love.”
Besides bedrooms grand and fetid, Littell’s mural offers vivid images of Moscow,
Paris, and New York in the 1920s as politically committed writers like
Mayakovsky spread their political and physical seeds. In New York, “Negro
musicians” entertain “the crowd with the latest wrinkle in jazz, something
called the boogie-woogie,” and in Moscow, Boris Pasternak and Mayakovsky fire up
revolutionaries at bohemian soirees. An inexorable momentum in the women’s
recollections brings Mayakovsky to the end of the decade and a melancholy,
tragic demise.

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